Robert D. Skeels

Professor Javier Lopez-Perez, Esq.

U.S. Immigration Law

May 1, 2016

Lesser Evil? The Democrats and immigration policy in the era of neoliberalism

During a 2014 interview with a high-profile politician, journalist Christiane

Amanpour posed the question of what to do about thousands of undocumented,

unaccompanied minors. Unwilling to answer the question, the politician dissembled.

Amanpour persisted, and asked point-blank “should they be sent back?” The

politician’s nativism-laden response was breathtaking, considering that they were

discussing refugee children likely qualifying for asylum:

But we have so to send a clear message, just because your child gets across

the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay. So, we don’t want to

send a message that is contrary to our laws…1

This callous statement may seem the domain of reactionary Republicans. Instead

it was made by the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential race front runner, Hillary

Clinton, whose rhetoric on immigration is frequently inflammatory. While Democrats

have traditionally enjoyed support of immigrant rights groups and leadership of those

groups, their record on immigration issues is dismal. Additionally, much of the worst

modern immigration policies and enforcement have occurred side by side with the rise

of neoliberalism. Here we will examine some of the key Democrats, and their roles in

1 (Clinton, 2014)

R.D. Skeels 2

imposing draconian immigration enforcement. We will also explore how the demands

of neoliberalism drive both harsher and exploitative immigration policies, and

exacerbate the necessity of peoples to migrate.

Contours of neoliberalism shape modern immigration policy

“Taking neoliberalism as the modern term describing the “Washington Consensus”

policies of deregulation, austerity, and privatization” we have the framework in which

to discuss immigration policy for the past several decades.2 While author Chris

Lehmann identifies Jimmy Carter as the first President to adopt neoliberal economic

policies, this survey will not go back that far.3 Moreover, despite neoliberalism being a

bipartisan project, our focus is on the Democrats. Border barrier walls, so-called “free

trade” agreements, work visa quotas, detention centers, and other such issues

surrounding immigration are all interrelated with, and driven by, neoliberal policy.

Much immigration itself is driven by neoliberalism, as Justin Akers Chacón writes:

Modern immigration is motivated by the same human desires for

sustenance, exacerbated by the destabilizing effects of global capitalism,

although the debate is often “nationalized” by immigration opponents to

deprive it of this essential context. Corporate capitalism, also called

neoliberalism by its detractors, dictates that state policy decisions favor

profitability over social sustainability—the interests of corporations and

investors over those of workers, indigenous peoples, the world’s poor, and

the environment.4

2 (Skeels, 2015)3 (Lehmann, 2014)4 (Akers Chacón 89)

R.D. Skeels 3

We will return to the relationship between neoliberalism and modern

immigration policies, but first we will examine policies in action as practiced by

Democratic politicians who champion neoliberal ideology. Our narrative begins with

1994, a year when deaths from immigration strategies with “names like Operation

Gatekeeper, Operation Safeguard, [and] Operation Blockade” began to skyrocket.5

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton became President on the heels of attempts to stem immigration from Mexico

through strategies including the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA).6 Ever the

opportunist, the new President seized the issue. Corey Robin identifies Clinton as one of

the more significant, early Democratic politicians espousing neoliberalism, and

Clinton’s right-of-center leanings were clearly on parade with his aggressive anti-

immigrant policies.7 Akers Chacón minces no words discussing this period:

[I]t was the Clinton administration that led the charge from Washington.

As previously discussed, Clinton’s Operation Gatekeeper was the most

formidable ant-immigrant undertaking ever by the federal government,

and is directly responsible for the deaths of over four thousand migrant

workers in the last eleven years. Clinton also presided over the passage of

the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal

Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act…8

The rest of the Akers Chacón’s passage cites the expansion of criminal law changes,

5 (Hing, “Defining America” 2)6 (Ibid. 155)7 (Robin, 2016)8 (Akers Chacón 231)

R.D. Skeels 4

harsher sentences, and increased causes for removability.9 Bill Ong Hing discusses the

early administration: “[A] year after President Bill Clinton took office, the Board Patrol

embarked on a strategy of ‘control through deterrence’ that has proven deadly.”10

Laying out the history of how Operation Gatekeeper came into being, Hing details how

the focus of the efforts was to prevent crossing in high-visibility areas of San Diego,

with some 52 miles of fencing stretching from Imperial Beach to the Otay Mountains.

This forced migrants to attempt crossing in significantly more dangerous regions. More

odious is that guidance for many of these efforts came from The Department of

Defense’s Center for Low Intensity Conflicts—in essence, Clinton was waging war on

defenseless migrants.11

Today the Clintons try to downplay the militarism and sheer aggressiveness of

their deterrence strategies, but as Adriana Maestas writes, “[d]uring his re-election

campaign against Senator Bob Dole, the Clinton campaign even ran an ad highlighting”

the harsh immigration laws of his administration.12 The human toll of Clinton’s policies

cannot be overstated. Hing, after demonstrating that these policies did not reduce the

number of undocumented persons entering, makes the following statement before

discussing the number of mortalities:

Certainly, southwest border control always had an evil, racist dark side,

with its targeting of Mexican migration during a thirty-year period when

Mexican made up far less than half the undocumented population in the

United States. However, the tragedy of Gatekeeper is the direct link of its

9 The modern immigration term (read euphemism) “removable” replaces the older term “deportable” for purposes of immigration law.

10 (Hing, “Defining America” 184)11 (Hing, “Defining America” 187–188)12 (Maestas, 2016)

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prevention through deterrence strategy to an absolutely horrendous rise in

the number of deaths among border-crossers who were forced to attempt

entry over terrain that even the INS knew to present “mortal dangers” due

to extreme weather conditions and rugged terrain.13

Hing, whose watershed book is now over a decade old, wrote: “The number of

migrant deaths increased 600 times from 1994 to 2000; a number that could be attributed

to Operation Gatekeeper…”14 Maestas, citing a 2014 source, states: “Since Operation

Gatekeeper was implemented, it is estimated that over 6,600 migrants have died on the

US side of the southern border, and the remains of another 1,000 migrants have been

unidentified.”15

Clinton’s border policies were only one facet of his administration’s neoliberal

approach to immigration. The previously mentioned Antiterrorism and Effective Death

Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility

Act (IIRAIRA), were coupled with Clinton’s austerity measures like the Personal

Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) to make the

precarious life of undocumented peoples even more difficult than before. Opal Tometi

writes on the former two acts: “As a result of these laws, millions of immigrants have

been victims of fast-track deportations and unjust, arbitrary detention; families and

communities have been torn apart; and entire generations of immigrants have been

criminalized”, while Michelle Alexander writes on the latter: “barred undocumented

immigrants from licensed professions”.16 17 Taken together these types of policies had a

13 (Hing, “Defining America” 190)14 (Ibid. 205)15 (Maestas, 2016)16 (Tometi, 2016)17 (Alexander, 2016)

R.D. Skeels 6

tendency to disproportionately punish the poorest of undocumented immigrants, and

opened the door to further racial profiling of peoples, who, as Hing says, “are regarded

as outside the construction of real Americans by many in the mainstream.”18 This last

aspect has had lasting consequences as Maestas explains:

“The 287(g) program empowered local law enforcement officials like

Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona to engage in racial profiling and to allow

local law enforcement agencies to check the immigration status of anyone

booked into jail.”19

Clinton’s dubious immigration legacy would be built on by his successors from

both political parties. Many of his policies, particularly the border enforcement and

criminalization focused ones, are still in force today. During the two terms of the

Republican administration that followed Clinton there was an explosion of immigrant

rights marches, including the largest in history—March 25, 2006 in Los Angeles, in

response the racist Sensenbrenner-King Bill (HR 4437) which would have provided $2.2

billion for more border fences, and “would not only make undocumented migration a

felony, it would criminalize the very act of associating with undocumented

immigrants.”20 21 Fortunately the bill never passed, and despite many efforts at similar

legislation, including those calling for highly exploitative guest-worker programs, the

status of the Clinton laws stayed essentially the same. The election of a Democrat in

2008 saw many immigrant rights groups hopeful for change. The fact that the new

18 (Hing, “Defining America” 115)19 (Maestas, 2016)20 The author participated in nearly all of the major Los Angeles immigrant rights activities at the time,

including the March 25th action, as member of several groups. He would later become one of the founding members of the Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC), which was created by prominent organizers Professor Jesse Díaz, Carlos Montes, and Gloria Saucedo.

21 (Akers Chacón 203)

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President was African-American caused many to think that he would be far more

sympathetic to the plight of undocumented peoples than his predecessors. These hopes,

it would turn out, were misplaced.

Barack Obama

Many assumed that as a person of color, President Barack Obama would be more

sensitive than his counterparts to the racism underlying U.S. immigration policies.

Lance Selfa details how Obama played on those expectation while running for office in

2008 by assuring National Council of La Raza (NCLR): “I will be a president who will

stand with you, who will fight for you…”22 What NCLR witnessed Obama do over the

next six years saw their leadership taking a bold step. While immigrant rights groups,

particularly those comprising the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, have been

traditionally afraid to criticize sitting Democratic Presidents, Obama’s propensity for

deportations saw NCLR President and CEO Janet Murguía speak out against him

during their 2014 awards event:23

For us, this president has been the deporter-in-chief.

Any day now, this Administration will reach the two million mark for

deportations. It is a staggering number that far outstrips any of his

predecessors and leaves behind it a wake of devastation for families across

America.

Many groups, including NCLR, have long been calling on the

president to mitigate the damage of these record deportations.24

22 (Selfa 112)23 For more on this phrase see: Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (ed.). The Revolution Will Not Be

Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge, Mass: South End Press, 2007. Print.24 (Murguía, 2014)

R.D. Skeels 8

Obama earned his “deporter-in-chief” epithet by building on Clinton’s

aggressive enforcement apparatus, while simultaneously expanding George W. Bush’s

surveillance state, and using this potent combination against immigrants on a scale

never before seen. Selfa discusses some of the administration’s policies, during the first

term alone:

Under the Department of Homeland Security’s “Secure Communities”

program, local police agencies forward the fingerprints of all apprehended

people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The government

then orders the deportation of any undocumented arrestees with criminal

records. In 2010, the Obama administration increased these “removals” by

71 percent over Bush’s final year in office. Under Obama, the number of

local agencies participating in Secure Communities has skyrocketed from

fourteen to more than 1,300. In August 2010 Obama signed a six-hundred-

million-dollar “border security bill” that includes adding 1,500 more

Border Patrol agents, customs inspectors, and other law enforcement

officers at the border, as well as unmanned aerial “drones.” By September

2011, the Obama administration had deported more than one million

undocumented people, compare to the 1.57 million the Bush

administration deported in its full eight-year term.25

While the overall figures won’t be available until Obama’s second term ends, the

record numbers of removals and returns cited above can be augmented with more

recent figures. According to The Washington Post’s Philip Bump “Under Obama, the

number of deportations through 2014 hit a new high — while the number of returns is

25 (Selfa 113)

R.D. Skeels 9

lower than at any point since the Ford administration.”26 Obama has already exceeded

the two million deportation mark that NCLR’s Murguía expressed consternation over,

and continues to pad that number as his administration winds down its last year.

Selfa’s mention of the Secure Communities program warrants discussion of

another prominent Democratic politician who served as Obama’s Secretary of

Homeland Security, namely Janet Napolitano. Likely chosen for the post because of her

hardline stance on immigration evidenced while she was Governor of Arizona,

Napolitano played a key role all of Obama’s draconian enforcement programs, and

oversaw the deportations during Obama’s first term. She was rewarded with the

University of California (UC) Presidency in 2013, despite having no background in

education whatsoever.27 Old habits seemingly die hard as Napolitano’s UC tenure has

been marred by many anti-immigrant incidents. A recent protest against the

controversial figure was chronicled in The Daily Bruin: “UCLA students protested

against cuts in funding for undocumented student resources and demanded University

of California President Janet Napolitano’s resignation as she left a forum at the UCLA

School of Law“. One of the students interviewed, Cristian De Nova, had a cogent point:

“As the former Secretary of Homeland Security, Napolitano’s involvement in programs

that resulted in deportations compromise her ability to represent undocumented

students”.28

Even the Obama cheerleaders at the New York Times have been critical of his

immigration policies. They wrote in regards to how the administration has been so

obtuse toward offering protections to those most deserving of asylum:

26 (Bump, 2015)27 It is with a profound sense of shame that the author discloses that Napolitano’s signature appears on

their UCLA diploma, as they were awarded a B.A. on March 21, 2014.28 (Pauker, 2016)

R.D. Skeels 10

Instead, it offered Operation Border Guardian, a grossly misnamed

immigration-enforcement surge that went after people this country did

not need to guard against. It began in January and lasted a month, but its

damage is still being felt. Among its tens of thousands of targets were

more than 300 recent migrants from Central America, youths who crossed

the border without their parents and turned 18 in the United States, thus

losing some of the protections granted to unaccompanied minors. After

they lost their cases to win asylum or other protection and were ordered

deported by immigration courts, Immigration and Customs Enforcement

hunted them down.29

As abject as the Obama administration has been on immigration, this last issue is very

much of interest since many of the children seeking asylum are escaping countries that

were destabilized by Obama’s U.S. Department of State. This brings us full circle to the

Democrat whose infamous quote heads this essay—Secretary of State Clinton.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Clinton’s long career, and multiple roles in government have afforded her opportunities

to affect immigration policy as few others. As such, it is difficult to discuss her impact

without a degree of overlap between her roles as First Lady, U.S. Senator, Presidential

candidate (twice), and Secretary of State. Moreover, a thorough treatment of all these

issues would exceed the scope of this essay. In addition to exploring her positions and

policy advocacy, we need to consider her role in facilitating many of the political

disasters that have created the humanitarian crises leading to the mass influx of

29 (Times Editorial Board, 2016)

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unaccompanied minor aliens.

Clinton’s Liberal supporters frequently chafe against associating her with her

husband’s policies, but as Alexander writes “But Hillary wasn’t picking out china while

she was first lady. She bravely broke the mold and redefined that job in ways no woman

ever had before. She not only campaigned for Bill; she also wielded power and

significant influence once he was elected, lobbying for legislation and other measures.”30

Indeed, if Hillary Clinton didn’t fully support Bill Clinton’s immigration policies, she

has had over two decades to demonstrate it one way or another. Rather, her own votes,

actions, and policy advocacy indicate that she is even further to the right on

immigration than most Democrats. Maestas outlines some fairly common Clinton votes

and positions:

As a senator, Hillary Clinton voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which

began construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border. In November

while campaigning in New Hampshire, Clinton said, “I voted numerous

times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to

prevent illegal immigrants from coming in, and I do think that you have

to control your borders…

In 2007, Senator Clinton supported then-Governor Eliot Spitzer’s (New

York) decision to withdraw his plan to give driver’s licenses to

undocumented immigrants. She then went further, saying that as

president she would not support driver’s licenses for undocumented

people.31

30 (Alexander, 2016)31 (Maestas, 2016)

R.D. Skeels 12

While Clinton frequently modulates her rhetorical positions, it is more than she is

generally to the right of most of her fellow Democrats. Instead, she is often to the right

of many Republicans on immigration issues. Exemplary is this 2004 newspaper passage:

“Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is staking out a position on illegal immigration that is

more conservative than President Bush”.32 This was not a fluke, the self-proclaimed

“Goldwater Girl” has consistently held herself out as being tougher than Republicans

on immigration and has crafted a message that essentially tars all immigrants as being

possible terrorists. Consider the latter part of this passage: “In an interview on WABC

radio, she said, ‘I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants,‘ and in an

interview on Fox News she accused Bush of not doing enough to ‘protect our borders

and ports‘”.33 Akers Chacón rightly identifies this strategy—one that Clinton has

mastered: “the Democratic Party has not only made ‘winning the war on terrorism‘ its

clarion call, but it is also responsible for helping to shift the debate to the border.”34 The

unparalleled nexus of domestic law enforcement, barriers, increased border patrol, and

so-called “Homeland Security” bound by policies including Secure Communities is

something that Clinton has advocated for during her career. Maestas deftly sums this

up: “Democrats like the Clintons have championed ‘get tough’ policies that have

bolstered bureaucracies and enterprises (private prisons) who have an incentive to

maintain the status quo.”35

Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State placed her in a unique position where her

involvement with the affairs of other states—frequently in Latin America—found her

playing a role in creating humanitarian crises that led to influxes of undocumented

32 (Washington Times, 2004)33 (Akers Chacón 232)34 (Ibid.)35 (Maestas, 2016)

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peoples. The Amanpour question regarding undocumented, unaccompanied minors is

particularly distressing when one considers what Hing writes:

Honduras, where the largest numbers of unaccompanied minors are

coming from, has become one of the most dangerous countries in the

world. In 2011, Honduras became the country with the highest murder

rate in the world. Homicide rates in El Salvador are only marginally lower

than in Honduras, with 66 individuals killed for every 10,000

inhabitants.36

The reason Honduras is as dangerous as Hing frames it is because of the 2009 coup

d’état that occurred with material support from Clinton’s State Department. Clinton

would then aid and abet the golpistas in consolidating power via a sham election.37

Clinton now denies her critical role in coup, to the extent that she has had a tacit

admission of support for it removed from the paperback version of her memoirs, and

recently dissembled about it in an interview with Democracy Now’s Juan Gonzales. Dana

Frank, listening to that interview, excoriated Clinton on her revisionism:

I just want to say this is like breathtaking that she’d say these things. I

think we’re all kind of reeling that she would both defend the coup and

defend her own role in supporting its stabilization in the aftermath. I

mean, first of all, the fact that she says that they did it legally, that the

Honduras judiciary and Congress did this legally, is like, oh, my god, just

mind-boggling. The fact that she then is going to say that it was not an

unconstitutional coup is incredible, when she actually had a cable, that we

36 (Hing,“Playing Politics” 2014)37 Golpistas: coup makers.

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have in the WikiLeaks, in which U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo

Llorens says it was very clearly an illegal and unconstitutional coup. So

she knows this from day one. She even admits in her own statement that it

was the Honduran military, that she says, well, this was the only thing

that was wrong there, that it was the military that took Zelaya out of the

country, as opposed to somehow that it was an illegal thing we did—that

the Honduran government did, deposing a president.38

The resulting chaos of the coup, which led to an, as Frank says, “almost complete

destruction of the rule of law in Honduras”, is a major factor in the influx of

undocumented children.39 Hing provides additional evidence of why so many

unaccompanied minor refugees flee: “920 Honduran children were murdered between

January and March of 2012”.40 He then discusses how many Latin American refugee

children fall victim to human and drug trafficking rings, and lastly summarizes the

findings of a Immigrant Legal Resource Center of immigrant survey:

Twenty-five percent of respondents found that youth come to the U.S.

based on a combination of four factors: neglect, abuse, or abandonment,

gang violence, drug violence, and poverty. This was followed by 19

percent fleeing gang violence and 16 percent fleeing poverty. In particular,

many respondents found that these cases involved youth who faced gang

recruitment and threats in their home country.41

While Honduras is not the only country Clinton played a role intervening in, it

38 (Frank, 2016)39 (Ibid.)40 (Hing,“Playing Politics” 2014)41 (Ibid.)

R.D. Skeels 15

serves as the one most indicative of her hypocrisy in stating these immigrant children

should be “sent back.”42 Hing asserts “Some of the youth may qualify for special

immigrant juvenile status, asylum or visas for victims of crime.”43 Indeed, these

unaccompanied minors seemingly meet the four elements for granting asylum under

U.S. Immigration Law. They have a well founded fear of persecution; based on past

persecution or risk of persecution in the future; because of membership in a particular

social group; and the persecution is by the government or a group that the government

is unwilling or unable to control. While Ms. Clinton bemoans sending a “message that is

contrary to our laws”, perhaps she should be more concerned with our government

following those laws instead.44 At any rate, unaccompanied minors require our

protection and assistance, not detention in for-profit prisons while awaiting removal.

Neoliberalism and Immigration

This brief survey of key Democrats and their impact on immigration policy would be

incomplete without exploring some of the reasons why these neoliberal policies are

favored. Neoliberalism requires the state, among other things, to privatize services once

in the domain of the public, to do away with any impediments to so-called “free trade,”

and to discipline labor in service to capital. Here we will examine three examples of

each, since a comprehensive survey of these topics would likely require an entire

volume.

Privatization is the watchword of neoliberal ideology. Only until recently,

immigrants being held while their status was being determined, or asylum seekers

42 For a comprehensive compendium of Clinton’s interventions see: Grandin, Greg. “A Voter’s Guide to Hillary Clinton’s Policies in Latin America”. The Nation. 15 Apr. 2016. Web. 30 Apr. 2016.

43 (Hing,“Playing Politics” 2014)44 (Clinton, 2014)

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unable to afford a bond while they awaiting hearing, were kept in facilities maintained

by the Board Patrol under the aegis of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).45 That was

until corporations in the for-profit prison business saw “opportunity” in immigrant

detentions. With the explosion of deportations under Obama, coupled with the flood of

immigrants created by former Secretary Clinton’s Latin American interventions, the

number of immigrants being detained while awaiting entry or exit has been staggering

and profitable. John Washington writes:

Execs from CCA, GEO Group and the other for-profit corporations

involved in family and immigration detention also get their cut. CCA

charges the government an estimated $296 dollars a day for each detained

woman or child, according to the New York Times. At a capacity of 2,400,

that will amount to over $250 million a year to lock up non-criminals:

Your tax dollars paying for months of child incarceration.46

It is of no small consequence that corporations CCA and GEO mentioned in the

Washington piece above both contributed a combined amount of over $130,000 to

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and her “I’m Ready for Hillary”

SuperPAC.47 Once more Clinton’s name is associated with horrific consequences to

persons from Honduras. Washington chronicles one migrant mother’s plight:

The conditions at another family detention center, in Karnes, Texas, drove

a 19-year-old woman to cut her wrists on June 4. She had a 4-year-old son

with her and wrote in a suicide note that the detention center was “killing

me little by little” and that she was “treated worse than an animal.” She

45 Formerly Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) 46 (Washington, 2016)47 (Hamilton, 2015)

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survived and, four days later, was deported to Honduras. 48

Privatization’s proverbial partners in crime are free trade agreements. Unlike

workers, who must endure a great number of hurtles to even have a chance of crossing

the border with permission to work, transnational corporations rarely face many

restrictions relocating their operations other than occasional tariffs, and having to

follow a host countries’ domestic laws. Corporations find that last part onerous, with

labor protections, environmental rules, and rules protecting local markets a barrier to

higher profits. Many of these restrictions had already been removed for U.S. firms

operating maquiladoras in Mexico under the Border Industrial Program (BIP) as early

1965.49 The net effect of the highly profitable BIP was hyper-exploitation of workers, and

wage depression on both sides of the border. In 1994 Bill Clinton signed the North

American Free Trade agreement, which saw virtually all protections for workers,

including agricultural workers and sustenance farmers, eschewed in favor of opening

exports to corporate interests.50 The loss of family farms, in many cases held for

generations, was one of the more egregious results, as David Bacon explains:

Corn imports also rose, from 2,014,000 tons to 10,330,000 tons from 1992 to

2008. US producers like Archer Daniels Midland, subsidized by US farm

bills, sold corn at artificially low prices to gain control of the Mexican

market. Then small farmers in Oaxaca, Chiapas and southern Mexico

couldn’t sell their crops at a price high enough to pay the cost of growing

them.51

48 (Washington, 2016)49 (Akers Chacón 115)50 (Ibid. 120)51 (Bacon, 2016)

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Bacon further discusses how post NAFTA migration to the U.S. from Mexico

continually increased until it peaked in 2008, and adds: “That too has been a benefit for

US employers, who have had access to an enormous pool of displaced people desperate

for work.”52 This combination of trade agreements freeing capital from national

confines, while simultaneously controlling the flow of workers via borders is easily seen

when viewing immigration through the lens of neoliberalism. It is no coincidence that

NAFTA and Operation Gatekeeper came into being the same year. Neither is it a

coincidence that Hilary Clinton’s most frequently discussed policy position during the

2016 Democratic primary elections has been her vacillating over the Trans-Pacific

Partnership (TPP) free-trade agreement.

If “offshoring” jobs via free-trade agreements is one way of disciplining labor to

the demands of capital, then the politics behind H-1B visas for technology companies

represents another. Hing discusses capital’s approach to ensuring no potential shortage

of highly skilled workers during the early Clinton administration:

A second solution to the prospect of a future workforce lacking essential

skills—one that was increasingly being viewed with enthusiasm by big

business interest and government powerbrokers alike—was immigration.

That is, the “right” kind of immigration. Leaders saw immigration of ever-

larger numbers of highly skilled immigrants as an immediate quick-fix to

a thorny situation.53

Much of the push for the H-1B work visa category originated with the Atari Democrats,

who recognized that they could accomplish several goals by using immigration in a

52 (Ibid.)53 (Hing, “Defining America” 106)

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weaponized form against labor.54 The H-1B program enables employers to ensure that

there are always more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)

workers available than needed, allowing them to depress prevailing wages and

maintain less than optimal working conditions. Ironically, these firms do this while

simultaneously claiming they have a shortage of workers to fill available positions—a

claim often echoed by the corporate media. In contrast to their narrative, the truth is

that there is a glut of qualified workers. These first two points from researcher Hal

Salzman’s statement to Senate Committee on the Judiciary are reflective of the actual

domestic STEM labor market:

(1) Overall, our colleges and universities graduate twice the number of

STEM graduates as find a job each year; that is, only about half of our

STEM graduates enter the STEM workforce; (2) Of the entire workforce,

only about a third of those with STEM degrees are employed in STEM

jobs.55

Later Salzman then uses the Atari Democrats’ “free market” logic against them:

If there were truly a tight labor market, with widespread, high demand for

IT workers, a free labor market would exhibit increasing wages […] The

most rigorous study of the direct impact of H-1B workers was conducted

by three researchers with access to actual wage records of firms (using

confidential data from the U.S. Department of the Treasury). Their

findings are striking:

““H-1Bs substantially crowd out employment of other workers...has an

54 For the phrase “Atari Democrats,” and their role in advancing neoliberalism in general, see: Geismer, Lily. “Atari Democrats.” Jacobin., Winter 2016. Web. 30 Apr. 2016.

55 (Salzman, 2016)

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insignificant effect on patenting...[and] H-1Bs lead to lower average

employee wages while raising firm profits.”56

Salzman’s findings coincide with many others, and the overall goal of using H-1B

in service to neoliberal aims has been framed thusly: “The manufactured STEM ‘crises’

has from the onset been a means to drive down the salaries of those professionals who

often don’t see themselves as being working class.”57 More disconcerting is a Mother

Jones article discussing how H-1B are now called “outsourcing visas” because they

allow technology firms to train workers so that they can return home and do the job for

those selfsame firms overseas at a lower wages.58 Technology firms hope to maintain

this status quo as evidenced by: “In her 2016 campaign bid, Hillary Clinton has

strengthened these ties, surpassing candidates from both parties in individual

donations from employees at the ten highest-grossing companies in Silicon Valley…”59

Beyond the Democrats

The demands of neoliberalism drive these and other immigration related policies in

service of corporate capital. The human toll of these market-oriented policies is difficult

to fathom, but it is clear that physical borders harm workers regardless of which side

they find themselves on. That the Democratic Party has been enthusiastic supporters,

and, more to the point, extremely effective implementors of neoliberal policies is

testament to which class they serve. As such, Democrats should never be considered the

lesser evil on immigration issues. We need a party that prioritizes human need over

corporate greed, and advocates for the abolishment of borders.

56 (Ibid. Source footnotes omitted.)57 (Skeels, 2013) The same piece contains numerous other studies and articles corroborating Salzman.58 (Harkinson, 2013)59 (Geismer, 2016)

R.D. Skeels 21

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